


Richie Tozier Is Late To Her Own Comedy Show

by buddyhollybenhur



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gender Changes, Bill Denbrough is a Good Friend, Coffee Shops, F/F, First Meetings, eddie has her shit together and knows how to hail a cab, harold theyre lesbians, richie is a disaster bi comedian, theyre grownups
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-17
Updated: 2020-05-17
Packaged: 2021-03-02 23:07:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,979
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24224791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buddyhollybenhur/pseuds/buddyhollybenhur
Summary: exactly what the title implies.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 2
Kudos: 19
Collections: Quarantine It Fic Fest





	Richie Tozier Is Late To Her Own Comedy Show

Richie Tozier was lost and her phone was dead and if she didn’t get to her venue in an hour, so was she. 

Steve was most likely spamming her texts or blowing up her phone with calls, and she didn’t exactly have time to charge it up in a Starbucks because the show was in a fucking hour and she should have charged her phone before she left the hotel for dinner or just ordered a room service hamburger- 

Calm down, a voice in her head said (it sounded a lot like Stanley Uris). Calm down, get a cab, and get to the place and do your show, then drink alone in your room and drunk-text Ben and Bill and Stan that you love them. 

So Richie stood at the street corner and flapped her hand in the air, looking ridiculous, and then she walked over to another street corner and repeated the exercise. And then, as she was starting to despair, someone tapped her shoulder. She turned to see a slightly concerned-looking woman standing behind her, tucking a lock of short brown hair behind her ear. 

“Hi, you look really panicky and I felt bad for you. What's going on?” she asked Richie bluntly. Richie sighed. 

“I’m doing a comedy show at… Jesus fucking Christ, I can’t remember the venue. It’s in less than an hour and my phone is fucking dead and my manager is going to kill me if an angry audience mob doesn’t first. And I dunno, it sucks to be thirty years old and this irresponsible.” 

The woman wrinkled her brow, and Richie felt bad for putting all her problems on this lady, but then she said “Yeah, that sucks, sorry.”

Richie blinked. 

“I might be able to help? I don’t know, come and find a phone charger at a cafe and I can buy you a coffee or something, it’s really late and kind of hot out so maybe an iced tea-”

“Coffee sounds fucking excellent.” Richie deflated. “If I’m going to be late I may as well be hopped up on caffeine for the performance.”

“I’m Edith Kaspbrak . Eddie, actually, people call me Eddie most of the time,” The woman chattered on as they walked (Richie was just following a stranger blindly through the streets of New York, which was probably a terrible idea, but Richie had no sense of self-preservation and Eddie was cute). “What about you?”

“Rachel. Richie, but my full name is Rachel,” Richie replied. “I’m a comedian, obviously, and kind of a disaster, also obviously.”

“You don’t seem like a disaster,” Eddie said critically, looking up and down Richie’s jean shorts and Hawaiian shirt. Her Converse were untied, her hair was messy (and impossibly frizzy in New York’s summer weather). Eddie, on the other hand, was dressed business casual and her short hair was pinned back with bobby pins. Richie assumed she had just come back from work. 

Pushing open the door of a cafe, Eddie settled them down at a table by a window before heading over to order. Richie fumbled around in the backpack she carried with her when she went on tour, found her charger and plugged it in while she waited. Within five minutes, she had 2% and fifty missed texts. Thirty of them were from Steve, getting increasingly hysterical, and there were ten from Stan (Steve had texted him, apparently) and several in a groupchat with Stan and Bill. Bill was waiting in the lobby of the venue where her show was, but for some reason- probably because he hated her- he hadn;t texted the name of the damn place. And Richie was not going to ask Steve where her show was if she wanted to live to see another day. 

So she was faced with the somewhat embarrassing task of Googling her own stand-up comedy show and finding out where it was located, while her phone buzzed with texts from her friends and Steve. 

Eddie sat down opposite her. “I didn’t know what you liked so I took a guess and got you the sugariest drink on the menu with extra whipped cream.”

“Oh, Eds, you really know me,” Richie sighed, taking a long sip of her drink. She looked up an8iu9d Eddie’s face was tinted pink. 

“Eds?”

“Sorry, I naturally nickname everybody,” Richie shrugged (her face was also kind of red, because she hadn’t even realized the name had slipped out). The drink was good- sickly sweet, whipped cream coming out of the top of the lid, chocolate syrup drizzled around. 

“My name is Edith. My nickname is Eddie, you can’t nickname a nickname, for gosh sakes-” Eddie sliced through the air with her hand before taking the most annoyed sip of tea Richie had ever seen. “Did you find out where your show is?”

“Um, the Apollo Theater.”

“The Apollo?!” Eddie asked, coughing. “Oh- I-”

“What?”

“It’s just- first of all, we’re so far from there, and secondly, you’re like a comedian.”  
Richie raised one eyebrow, eating some of the whipped cream off of her straw. “I told you that…?”

“I didn’t know you meant a comedian-comedian, I thought you were some start-up stand-up who was late to some open mic night! Not…” Eddie tapped on her phone, showing Richie a photo of herself. It was one of the better ones on the website, taken when Richie was doing a show at the Fillmore Detroit a few months ago. “Not Richie Tozier, who is apparently a nationally known comedian!” Eddie looked at Richie with a mixture of indignation, shock, and possibly annoyance. “If you’re nationally known and on your second US tour you have to pay me back for that drink.”

“Are you reading my Wikipedia page?” Richie asked, amused, while her phone vibrated and buzzed on the windowsill. 

“Maybe…” Eddie mumbled, distracted. “You dated the guy from that cop show?”

“Maybe…” Richie replied. Her phone suddenly started to play the I’m Just A Bill song from Schoolhouse Rock. 

“Is that your ringtone? Oh my-”

“Calm it, Eds!” Richie interrupted, enjoying the look on Eddie’s face. “It is my ringtone, but only for my friend Bill. Hey, Billiam!” she greeted, taking the call. 

“Hey, Richie.”

“What’cha doing?” she asked. 

“I’m at this comedy show, but the performer apparently isn’t here. Know anything about that?” he replied, somewhere between amused and angry. 

“I think she might be at a Starbucks with a girl she met a while ago.” Richie would be lying if she said she wasn’t enjoying this a little bit. 

“Is the girl cute, Richie?” Bill asked knowingly. Richie bit her tongue and regretted coming out to him for the millionth time. 

“Bill-”

“Richie.”

“Yeah, I guess she is,” Richie admitted, making a show of looking Eddie over. The shorter woman looked almost apopletic. ‘She’s what?!’ Eddie mouthed, and Richie made the shush sign.  
“Oh, well I guess that warrants ruining your career then,” Bill sighed. “Have fun on your date and get here soon, love you.”

“Love you too,” Richie said, and he hung up on her. 

Eddie looked slightly put out by the “love you”- or maybe that was just Richie’s imagination- so she felt the need to say “My best friend Bill, he’s at the show.”

“Yeah, okay, let’s get over there!” Eddie exclaimed, snatching up her messenger bag. “Come on, pack your backpack up.”

“Let’s?” Richie asked, because it kind of seemed like Eddie was planning on coming with her. And she definitely wasn;t complaining about that, but-

“I want to see you walk into that theater,” Eddie said with a trace of embarrassment. “Who knows what you could do on the way there.”

“I could do all kinds of things, Eddie baby,” Richie winked, to diffuse some of the awkwardness. Eddie hit her with a balled-up napkin and they went outside to hail a cab. 

Eddie was much better at cab-hailing than Richie (“I’m a New York native, dumbass, you were waving your hand around like a lady with a handkerchief”) and soon they were on their way to the Apollo. 

“Going to see that lady comedian?” the cab driver asked, and they both tried very hard to conceal giggles. 

“She’s just a comedian,” Richie corrected him. “And I heard she kind of sucks.”

Eddie rolled her eyes fondly. 

They pulled up twenty minutes later to a show that started five minutes ago. Eddie stood awkwardly on the side of the street, and Richie very quickly pulled her notebook out of her backpack. On it, she wrote Edith Kaspbrak has authorization to attend the show for free. Love from Richie Tozier xo 555-550-7904

“Show this to the ticket guy and you can get in for free and see the show, and stuff, and if he doesn't let you in have him call me,” Richie said in a rush, pulling off her shirt to reveal the tank-top she was supposed to wear onstage. A thought struck her. “Unless, of course, you don’t want to see it, in which case-”

“No, no, no! I’d love to!” Eddie replied quickly. “Um, break a leg.”

“With my luck, I will!” Richie called, sprinting to the side entrance for performers. 

Steve looked like he could commit a homicide, and he would have, if the soundbooth guy hadn’t seen her and announced “Now, Richie Tozier!”

She ran onstage, immediately catching Bill’s eye from where he sat front and center. He rolled his eyes at her, she smirked back, and she launched into her routine. 

She did a fantastic job, if she did say so herself. She had another show the next night, and usually she treated the first night as a sort of test run, but tonight she threw all of her energy into exaggerated faces and dramatic gestures that had the audience laughing for the whole hour. Halfway through a joke about drive-through banks, she had the thought that this performance was just like when high-school girls post on their stories for one person to see, and then she dismissed it. 

At another point, she was telling a joke on autopilot, eyes sweeping the crowd for someone in a pale yellow business suit. Then she realized she hadn’t been paying attention to what she was saying for, like, five minutes and snapped back into it. 

Richie finished the show with an enthusiastic “Thank you so much, New York, I’m Richie Tozier and that was me Trying My Best!” With a final laugh, she exited the stage and grabbed her backpack, tossing it over her shoulder as they ran to the lobby. People started to clap when they saw her, but she only saw Bill, who she caught in a hug. 

“Trashmouth Tozier!” he said. “Come a long way from the playground blacktop!”

“Eh?” she asked. Then, over her shoulder, she saw the pale yellow blazer and skirt and yelled “EDDIE!”

She turned around, halfway out the door. Richie waved her over. “Eddie Kaspbrak, meet Billiam Denbrough.”

“Nice to meet you. You were the cute one at the coffee shop?” Bill asked with absolutely no shame at all as he shook Eddie’s hand. Richie slammed her forehead into Bill’s shoulder. 

Eddie’s eyebrows were at her hairline as she shook Bill’s hand, but she made no comment at all except “Nice to meet you.”

“I was going to take Richie here for a celebratory drink, if you’d like to come along,” Bill said- again, with no shame- without consulting Richie at all. “Rich, put a shirt on.”

Scowling, Richie threw on her button down, exiting the theater behind Bill and Eddie- who were apparently hitting it off- with a wave.  
As Bill hailed a cab, Eddie crossed her arms and turned to Richie. 

“So. Cute one at the coffee shop?”

Richie groaned, but Eddie slid her hand in Richie’s, and they got into the back of the cab together.


End file.
